This is one of my favorite poems from the Diary collection. I don’t think that one has to have survived the Holocaust to have an experience like the one Sutzkever describes, in which hearing or seeing or smelling some particular thing suddenly takes one back to another time in one’s life. In Sutzkever’s case, the catalyst is seeing, and listening to, the storks who migrate through Israel back to northeast Poland/Lithuania/western Belarus—where Sutzkever was born but to which he could not return.

While in The Blade of Grass from Ponar, I translated Lite as Lithuania, this time, I chose to translate it as “what then was Poland.” I did this for a number of reasons, one being that, in this context, it is correct: Sutzkever’s hometown, Vilna, was indeed part of Poland at the time he lived in it. Going with what some might describe as an over-translation had other benefits, the first being musical: Poland goes better with “caravan” than Lithuania does.

Beyond that, “what then was Poland” drives home for the English reader that the place Sutzkever is longing for is one that no longer exists as it once did. Unfortunately, using either “Lithuania” or “Poland” as the translation for Lite carries the danger of leading an English reader to believe that Sutzkever held more attachment to each of those countries, as we currently define them, than he really did. The Vilna he had known and loved, which had shaped him, was a city with a significant Jewish presence, but where Jews were not necessarily seen as fellow citizens by Poles or Lithuanians. At the time when Sutzkever wrote this poem, Vilna was still behind the Iron Curtain. Even today, he might have had difficulties visiting: Lithuania has, in recent years, taken to prosecuting former Jewish partisans, claiming that they murdered innocent Lithuanians (they didn’t, but Lithuanian volunteers did carry out the majority of the murders of Jews at Ponar).

While it’s always a danger, when translating from Yiddish, to make too much of the presence of words borrowed from other languages, there is a certain Polish presence in “A Horizon of Furious Salt.” “Butshan” the Yiddish word for stork, is borrowed from the Polish bocian. At the very end of the poem, Sutzkever uses the rather unusual Yiddish verb brentslen, to describe the demon strumming the “string of storks.” This word may be a related to a similar Polish and Russian word, which also means to pluck or strum, but which my klezmer friend Michael Alpert tells me has also come to denote playing a stringed instrument badly. When this poem appears in a book, I may change “pluck” to “strike.”

In the original collection, “The Blade of Grass from Ponar” and “A Horizon of Furious Salt” appear next to one another. I look forward to replicating this order when these translations are published as a book, so I can keep readers on their toes about the imperfect translations of Lite.

Migrating birds, hundreds of thousands of storks among them, travel through modern-day Israel, and are particularly fond of the Hula Valley. There was a time when the Israelis were, as Yehuda Amichai once wrote, “convinced the Hula swamp had to be drained” due to malaria. However, doing so proved disastrous for migrating birds, and the valley was eventually filled with water again. As Amichai wrote, “it was all a mistake.” Now some birds are so comfortable in the Hula Valley that, in a twist that is both fitting and ironic, they stay year-round.

One of my poems (not to be confused with one of my translations!) was published today in the online journal Habitat Magazine. The poem is inspired by a month I spent subletting an apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It's from a series of poems I've written about cities and languages, or perhaps a different series about childhood, or yet another series on being Jewish in the 21st Century.

This poem first appeared in Poetica Magazine. I am sharing it again in light of Stephen Miller's recent comments on "cosmopolitan" outlooks and the Trump Administration's demand that prospective immigrants be fluent in English.

Of All Words I Envy Only One

Of all words I envy only one: The Hebrew yehi’,“let there be.” Would the creator grant me a sparkof the word, the smallest trace of its strength, yehi’,I would proclaim, let there be song, and it would be.

Let song be made from a rainbow’s vanishing end,from a single ant, one lost in the desert,from moonlit ivory born in the jungle,from a human skull laughing at its own reflection.

Let a star become song, for no one leaves it at leasta wooden grave-marker, there where it falls.A small face of grass in the aquarium giant and green,a tiny golden ring, for its wife cannot see.

Yehi’, let there be a song, which until now has never been,for the living and for these, whom men name “the deceased.”Yehi’, let there be joy, and joy would be and all would be joyful,Yehi’, and for an instant suffering would grow hollow.

More translations are coming soon in The Ilanot Review, West Branch, and The Northwest Review of Books. (The last two will only be in print, as far as I know.)

Three of my Sutzkever translations have been published in the online journal Circumference, along with a translator's note linking them to the current refugee crisis. Read them here: http://circumferencemag.org/?p=3829

I will be reading for the Another Way to Say reading series in Brooklyn, on March 9th. This reading series is dedicated to works in translation, writing influenced by multilingualism and the polyglot experience in New York City. I'll be reading some of my own poetry, as well as translations of the poet Anna Margolin, who was very much a poet of 1920s New York. If I have time, I'll squeeze in a Sutzkever translation or two. Hope you can make it.

I will be participating in a reading at Book Culture in NYC on February 26th. The reading is sponsored by The Grief Diaries, an online journal that recently published two of my Sutzkever translations. I'll be reading those translations, as well as my own poetry.

My project translating Abraham Sutzkever's collection Poems from My Diary wasrecently awarded a 2016 Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. You can read the full press release here: